Well look at the reality of the situation: ST09's 3rd week was Memorial Day weekend, and in 3 days, It made $22 million. STID made $16.8 million in 3 days on a regular 3rd weekend with lots of competition AND in 500 FEWER theaters for that weekend. Pretty impressive.

China alone may have made $27-30 million last week too. That's a huge bump for international numbers.

Another variable in play is a potential blockbuster that is a bust by word of mouth as will be the case with "After Earth", it creates an unplanned whole in the movie schedule, so word of mouth helps Trek with slower and steady climb.
Saw it again yesterday the theater was about 1/2 full and the audience seemed to enjoy it with their sporadic interaction.

I think it is because of the 'Into Darkness' and a story featuring terrorism, revenge, murder, suicide bombings, grim deaths etc instead of a more 'fun' adventure.

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It's not so much the themes in Into Darkness as the way they were presented. Critics had misgivings about Iron Man 3 for similar reasons. Both films could be accused of attempting to provide a comforting escapist fantasy to wipe away the lingering PTSD of 911 (and add the Marathon bombing to that) by setting black hats against white hats. It's similar to, let's say, how The Green Berets sanitized the Vietnam war. While you could say that they attempted to almost make Khan seem sympathetic, in the end he turned out to be your usual mustache-twirler, and Admiral Marcus was as much if not more of an irredeemably corrupt bad-guy as Quaritch in Avatar.

I'm sure a script like Into Darkness could have been written that had been truly dark, as written, it's nowhere near as dark and mature as the Nolan Batman films from which they were clearly inspired. It's dark colors out of a crayola box, basically.

I expected an small increase box office outside USA, but I did not expect a smaller domestic audience than Star Trek. Can anyone explain the reason for this?

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*I* think it has to do with bad WOM by some hardhearted fans disappointed by the *villain* reuse.

I personally know one of them. She (unspoiled on that detail) finally saw it and, well, to put it mildly, hates it to high heaven. I can totally see her bad mouthing the film to everyone she knows.

Multiply her unhappiness by X number of times like minded people are spreading bad WOM and that could account for the lower DBO. Just a theory.

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It's not just that. It wasn't a good movie, at least not by my standards. And this is coming from someone that really wanted to like this film in spite of the TWOK and Dark Knight rip-offs. I LOVED the last one, but I can't take this one at all. Spock was written out of character to me, and of course I think they mishandled S/U. They really didn't follow up on the events of the last film at all, and I think they could have if they seemingly hadn't decided that this film would be a barrage of action sequences that felt meaningless in the end...

Sorry to go on a bit of a tangent. All I'm saying is the horrible TWOK/TOS stuff wasn't the only reason to not like this film. I haven't seen most, and I mean most of TOS and I can barely remember TWOK, so that wasn't all of it to me. It was just poor movie making. I'm sorry if I offend anyone here that liked it.

And I'll just point out, on a brighter note, that there is the foreign box office. So, that's something. Although, marketing may have more to do with that than the quality of the film, but that's debatable.

Thare too many bigger franchises out there competing for a movie audience. Lets face it, Fast and Furious and Iron Man have a bigger fan follwoing among sci-fi / fantasy fans and the general public than Trek.

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Fast and Furious has a higher following among sci fi fans than Star Trek?